I suspect that the leaders of the cargo cults were leaders in that society before the "Outside Context Problem" happened, and that the ideas followed by the cul

I suspect that the leaders of the cargo cults were leaders in that society before the "Outside Context Problem" happened, and that the ideas followed by the cult will come from what kind of leader they were. If they were previously a religious leader then the cult would look like a religion. I think a better example of a cargo cult than bad science is climate change denial. The followers see the potential loss of "cargo" in the form of their current way of life as a problem and the leaders apply the skills that brought them success in politics to that problem. Someone good at reading legal documents is going to think that there is something wrong with scientific papers. A climate change denial group in the UK [1] rented office space from one of the scientific institutions that used to meet in Carlton House Terrace. The GWPF held meetings where they could talk in a sciency way even though they were not reporting any real science that they had done themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...